Getting Started

Make Oakland Local is a site that is both a place interested folks can hear more about what’s happening with the technical side of our network, and a place where registered Oakland Local users can post comments, questions, and ideas.

Meta

To the extent possible under law,
Oakland Local (and contributors)
has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to
Make Oakland Local (this site).
This work is published from:
United States.

The shortened URL domain for Oakland Local was oak.lc. It will expire in a couple of weeks, and will not be renewed. I’ve turned the shortened links off on the site.

The editors use bit.ly heavily, and it is a bad idea which will end up hurting the site at some point in the future. When it does, I probably won’t point back to this post, because that would be punitive, and I am loading up all my petty on the front-end. ^_^

I am re-thinking my decision to no longer keep the OL network (well, plugins and themes) in a code repo.

It may take a while for me to get around to re-syncing it with the current code. The reasons is that I find it difficult to share the changes being made to the site, which in turn makes it difficult to accept changes from would-be contributors. This was made evident with a recent addition of a plugin, where I was still the gatekeeper (gotta vet the plugin), but there wasn’t a clean pipeline for the plugin to be added without knowing someone to email me directly.

If the archive goes back up even for a short while, I will personally dedicate time to moving a large number of articles to a temporary WordPress site or to the new Oakland Local. I will stop whatever I am doing to take care of this. The archive has a gold mine of articles in it.

Sophie, you keep mentioning SEO-friendliness in your suggestions. That is a trigger for me to ignore the message until later. At best, it doesn’t mean anything, and at worst it is a buzz term used to misappropriate credibility.

I think including a meta description to the site is a good idea, because it helps people know what Oakland Local is about in some views in some search engines.

I immediately regret writing that reply as such. It seems off-putting, as if I don’t want your contributions, and that is not the case.

SEO is used as a term, largely by people who do not understand how search engines work, and it creates a systemic response to content creation that is harmful to community sites like Oakland Local, where we should be focused on assisting the people in this city, rather than catering to supposed guidelines for writing.

OL has a large amount of folks contacting me daily, and the term “SEO” is a common warning sign that they don’t know what they are asking. I will try not to respond here in the same way I do to what I perceive as trolling elsewhere.

It is my recommendation to you that if you want to be taken seriously by people who build websites, you should excise that term from your vocabulary.

Also, we don’t care what Google does, we care about the tools, standards and protocols that allow our site and content to be of service to those with network access. An endorsement of a single service will never help a suggestion.

The OL archive was hacked recently. This isn’t entirely surprising, considering that the site was left as a Drupal 6 instance, which itself requires an older version of PHP, which itself required an older version of Ubuntu (10.04).

The hack is basically the server turning into a node in a network of servers that generate malicious traffic, likely to be used in DDoS attacks. The side affect of the compromise is that as soon as the web server is turned on, almost all of the server resources are used up, making the process of exporting the content out of the site impossible.

As having a compromised machine violates the TOS at Linode, I am unable to keep the archive turned on unless I am fixing it, hence the recent downtime.

We never intended to keep that site up, it was a temporary setup while we migrated the content we wanted from it into WordPress. This leaves us with two paths, or really one.

We let the archive go, focus on the future.

We restore the server from a backup, proceed to migrate the bulk of the articles into a temporary WordPress site on the network, and let editors cherry pick the posts to bring into the main site.

Because of the nature of the server setup for hosting the Drupal 6 archive, it is non-trivial to restore from a backup, and I will discussing our options with Susan.

Prefer: We restore the server from a backup, proceed to migrate the bulk of the articles into a temporary WordPress site on the network, and let editors cherry pick the posts to bring into the main site.

If the archive goes back up even for a short while, I will personally dedicate time to moving a large number of articles to a temporary WordPress site or to the new Oakland Local. I will stop whatever I am doing to take care of this. The archive has a gold mine of articles in it.

I am discontinuing the practice of keeping the WordPress network in a git repo. It is a neat practice, but it doesn’t work with OL as a group of people.

It adds me as a gatekeeper for code pushes.

New WordPress developments, such as rolling background security updates, make it deprecated for the main reason we were using it.

The network, while containing five separate sites, is technically simple. We aren’t doing anything crazy with them, and the same core group of administers watch each site.

I will still remain the primary maintainer for the code, and will continue to test changes on the staging server, but I am confident removing this extra step will make it so the plugins get updated more often.